The Unknown Masterpiece

It’s fun to borrow a title from Balzac (especially when the novella it names gave rise to Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse”). Alas, in the cinema, there are many unknown masterpieces, and it’s delightful to see a couple of them surface, even if only in name, as Jacques Rozier’s “Adieu Philippine” and “Maine-Océan” did on Girish Shambu’s blog recently. They’re shown rarely, and I don’t know another French director (beside Jean Eustache) whose unavailability on DVD is equally grievous. Rozier’s absence from the nation’s Netflix queues is all the sadder because his work is blithe and magical, and magic is rare—though in a good, long interview earlier this year in Chronic’art, the director said, “magic is better not spoken of.” The movies are indeed masterworks (which I’ve written about in the magazine on the rare occasions of their New York screenings); in the meantime, the Chronic’art interview will have to do. Rozier talks about Jean Renoir, about his most recent film, “Fifi Martingale” (which was completed in 2001 and screened at the Venice Film Festival that year; Rozier says he’s going to re-release it—but only after re-tweaking it in the editing room), and about how the industry has changed since he made his first feature, “Adieu Philippine,” in 1961:

At that time, there was still a hint of freedom on the part of producers. The commission was: make a film within the given budget. We weren’t required to get the approval of various production and distribution entities on each slightest bit of casting. It was, ultimately, freedom.

He talks about his shoots:

My shoots are always funny. I don’t know what other people’s shoots are like, but you’d think mine were Woody Allen comedies. Things don’t quite go as planned, but the way they go is even more interesting, so we include them in the script.

And he speaks about Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he was close at the time (and whose success, with “Breathless,” led to Rozier’s introduction to Godard’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, who backed “Adieu Philippine”):

My parents had homes in Paris and Cannes. One year I said to Jean-Luc, “I can put you up if you want to come to Cannes for the festival.” He said, “No. What kind of event is this? You’d think it’s an agricultural fair; every year the people meet again, they’ve gotten a little older, so I’m not coming.” Two weeks later, he calls me, he shows up at Cannes and goes to the five-and-ten to buy a toothbrush, a letter from Jean Seberg in hand, determined to make the first important feature with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

And the rest is history.

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